Trends Identified

Transparently Immersive Experiences
When it comes to transparently immersive experiences, technology is introducing transparency between people, businesses and things. As technology evolves to be more adaptive, contextual and fluid, it will become more human-centric. Besides AR, companies should look to digital workspaces, connected homes, virtual reality and 4D printing in this realm.
2017
Top Trends in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2017
Gartner
Digital Platforms
As digital business moves away from siloed business ventures and toward interconnected ecosystems, technology is evolving from compartmentalized technical infrastructure to ecosystem enabling platforms. Businesses must think about how to create platform-based business models and what technology is needed to support that move.
2017
Top Trends in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2017
Gartner
Intelligent Apps and Analytics
Organizations are applying AI techniques to create new app categories (such as virtual customer assistants [VCAs]) and improve traditional applications (such as worker performance analysis, sales and marketing, and security). Intelligent apps have the potential to transform the nature of work and the structure of the workplace. When building or buying an AI-powered app, consider where its AI impact will be
2017
Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018
Gartner
Intelligent Things
Intelligent things are physical things that go beyond the execution of rigid programming models and exploit AI to deliver advanced behaviors that interact more naturally with their surroundings and with people. AI is driving advances for new intelligent things, such as autonomous vehicles, robots and drones, and delivering enhanced capability to many existing things, such as IoT-connected consumer and industrial systems (see Figure 4).
2017
Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018
Gartner
Conversational Platforms
Conversational platforms will drive the next big paradigm shift in how humans interact with the digital world. They will shift the model from technology-literate people to people-literate technology. The burden of translating intent will move from the user to the computer. The system takes a question or command from the user in natural language. It responds by executing a function, presenting content or asking for additional input.
2017
Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018
Gartner
AI Foundation
Interest in AI is growing, as shown by an increase of more than 500% in the number of inquiry calls from Gartner clients about topics related to AI in the past year. 1 A 2017 Gartner survey found that 59% of organizations are still gathering information to build their AI strategies, while the rest have already made progress in piloting or adopting AI solutions. 2 Furthermore, the market indicates strong investment in startups selling AI technologies. Creating systems that learn, adapt and potentially act autonomously will be a major battleground for technology vendors through at least 2020. The ability to use AI to enhance decision making, reinvent business models and ecosystems, and remake the customer experience will drive the payoff for digital initiatives through 2025.
2017
Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018
Gartner
Digital Twins
A digital twin is a digital representation of a real-world entity or system (see Figure 5). The implementation of a digital twin is an encapsulated software object or model that mirrors a unique physical object (see Note 1). Data from multiple digital twins can be aggregated for a composite view across a number of real-world entities. The notion of a digital representation of real-world entities or systems is not new. You can argue that this was a central notion in the IT industry with the creation of computer-aided design representations of physical assets or profiles of individual customers. The difference in the latest iteration of digital twins is: The robustness of the models
Digital twins' link to the real world, potentially in real time
The application of advanced big data analytics and AI
The ability to interact with them and evaluate "what if" scenarios
2017
Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018
Gartner
Cloud to the Edge
Edge computing describes a computing topology in which information processing and content collection and delivery are placed closer to the sources and sinks of this information. Edge computing draws from the concepts of mesh networking and distributed processing. It tries to keep the traffic and processing local, with the goal being to reduce traffic and latency. As such, the notion of edge content delivery has existed for many years. The "where to process the data" pendulum has swung between highly centralized approaches (such as a mainframe or a centralized cloud service) and more decentralized approaches (such as PCs and mobile devices). Connectivity and latency challenges, bandwidth constraints and greater functionality embedded at the edge favor distributed deployment models. The advantages of processing power and low costs of operating at hyperscale, coupled with the complexity of managing and coordinating thousands of geographically separated endpoints, favor the centralized model.
2017
Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018
Gartner
Immersive Experience
While conversational platforms are changing the way in which people interact with the digital world, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) are changing the way in which people perceive the digital world. This combined shift in perception and interaction models leads to the future immersive user experience.
2017
Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018
Gartner
Blockchain
Blockchain is evolving from a digital currency infrastructure into a platform for digital transformation. Blockchain and other distributed-ledger technologies provide trust in untrusted environments, eliminating the need for a trusted central authority.
2017
Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018
Gartner